Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a user interface and, more specifically, to enhanced target selection for a touch-based input enabled user interface.
Description of the Related Art
Touch screen displays are becoming increasingly common in consumer devices. For example, over the past decade, desktop monitors and hand-held devices have incorporated multi-touch surfaces with which users can interact to provide input information to the underlying devices. One interesting aspect of a multi-touch surface is the ability to control multiple degrees-of-freedom. For example, conventional rectangle manipulations include translation, rotation, and scaling operations performed on a multi-touch surface by dragging, rotating, or expanding/contracting, respectively, one or more contact points. Thus, a user may interact with an application via a multi-touch surface by tapping, dragging, expanding, contracting, or rotating one or more contact points on the multi-touch surface. These operations are typically more efficient to perform on a multi-touch surface than with traditional input/output devices.
Even though touch screen displays have increased in popularity, many applications include a user interface that is not optimized for receiving touch-based inputs. For example, an application may include a conventional menu bar and/or a conventional toolbar that includes small icons that are difficult for a user to accurately select. The user's ability to accurately touch a particular location compared to a conventional mouse input is decreased to the point where a user may select the wrong tool when attempted to interact with the interface using the touch screen display.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a system that seamlessly adjusts the user interface to be more accessible to touch-based input.